Welcome to the February 2020 issue of the CMD-IT newsletter.  Happy Black History Month!

To celebrate Black History Month in this issue we are highlighting two professionals who are having an impact today on computer science as well as two organizations that are helping impact and change the culture of computer science.

The 2020 ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Call for Participation,  Scholarship applications, and Sponsorship sales are open. Please be sure to submit your applications soon. To inspire you to participate and get involved we've interviewed Tapia Program Chair Robert Parke and our Program Deputy Chair Patti Ordonez. 

Best Regards,

CMD-IT Leadership   

Patricia Ordóñez, Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras, is the Program Committee Deputy Chair for the 2020 ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing. I spoke to Patti about her career and her goals for Tapia 2020.

Tell me a little bit about your background - where did you grow up?

I am a first generation American; my parents were immigrants from Colombia and I was born in Kentucky but grew up in Maryland. My dad was a surgeon who became an ER doctor, my mother was a microbiologist. They met when she was one of his instructors.

How did you get into Computer Science?

This is a very complicated story. I went to a Math and Science private high school in Baltimore where I was focused on mathematics. I took a Computer Science class and really liked it, but my teacher discouraged me, he told me he didn't think I was logical. I attended Johns Hopkins University as an electrical engineering student. I took a mini computer class where there were five women in a class of 100. I ended up moving into Mathematics and doing what was necessary for Pre-Med. I later switched to a Spanish major and decided that I would go into teaching and teach Math, Sciences and Spanish. I became a high school teacher who taught math and Spanish and coached field hockey and lacrosse. Eventually I left teaching but continued coaching and became a ballroom dancing teacher. I moved to a tech company and began working in tech support eventually becoming the lead technical trainer for the organization. Eventually I quit and took three months to travel through South America.

In Latin America I realized that every town had an Internet café. Travel also made me realize what privilege I had being an American and white and how where you are born can change the direction of your life. I was inspired to find a way to bring computing to everyone in Latin America. I decided to get my PhD from the department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Paying for it was a challenge but I was able to get my sister to buy half my house and I applied for scholarships and took out loans. I became the first student in the Department of Computer Science at UMBC to receive an NSF GRFP (Graduate Research Fellowship). I became passionate about data science before it was even an area of focus. I could see there were huge troughs of data in medicine that needed algorithms, data structures, and computer science to make them useful.

When I was completing my PhD, I found I had many options - industry, a Postdoc or a Faculty position. I wanted to teach and do research and I also wanted to be in a Spanish speaking country. I decided to go to the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras. I was surprised when I got there to find Puerto Rico was just beginning to move to electronic medical records (EMRs). Since my research depended on EMRs, I had to rethink my research direction.